“Now you’ll never be alone,” a friend told me when she heard I was pregnant with Firstborn Son.

The thought was kind of creepy to me. I love being alone!

Never alone? I imagined this little creature, slowly growing in my belly, observing everything I did and hearing everything I said.

As a parent, you have to be good. But cultivating a spiritual life can be hard precisely because you are a parent.

Karen Maezen Miller, author of “Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood,” is a mother, wife, writer and Zen Buddhist priest. Listening to her read from her book (www.mommazen.com), you know you can be a better wife, mother, woman, human. I’ve never met her, but I love her.

Miller will be conducting her first one-day mother’s retreat in Sierra Madre on June 20. I’m already signed up. One day is all I can do, but already I am dreaming about the peace, time spent in the gardens, and eye-opening, uplifting conversation with Miller.

Get more info at www.mothersplunge.com.

Meanwhile, here’s what Miller had to say about moms and spirituality:

Q: How do you make faith an everyday thing?

A: Few of us realize that true faith is already an everyday thing. We live in faith, but few of us call it faith. We might think of faith as a belief in something after life or beyond life, or more important than life. But faith is apparent everyday when we stop to examine the truth of our lives.

I like to remind people that life itself is an act of faith. When we exhale, we do so in faith that there is oxygen to breathe in again. When we take a step, we do so in faith that we will not fall off this earth.

All of us, no matter how skeptical we might believe ourselves to be, are capable of deep faith. We prove it to ourselves with every breath and every step. Faith is not what we know; faith is living with the absence of knowing.

Q: Now, how to recognize and cultivate this faith?

A: By starting where you are. Our children always demonstrate this to us. First, by their marvel and delight in the magic and beauty of life that we have become blind to. They see the world as wondrous. It is. They see the world as rising up to meet them. It does.

I can remember one day driving back from preschool with my daughter and she looked up and saw the moon hanging in the blue sky. She said, “Look Mommy, the moon follows us wherever we go!” She was right. I had long since stopped seeing it in that way – as a miraculously faithful companion.

Every ordinary act we engage in has a spiritual dimension. Our daily lives are powered by a life force beyond our comprehension. There is a Zen saying, “Marvelous power, supernatural activity: chopping wood and carrying water.” When you begin to recognize and trust this dimension in your life, instead of taking it for granted, faith comes naturally.

There is another facet to faith that emerges when we come to realize for ourselves that there is little we can know about how life will go, little we can explain, and almost nothing we can control. This is the very description of parenthood, and that is why I call it a spiritual practice. It is faith in life itself, in goodness itself, in nature’s own benevolence. When we accept life as it is, when we pay attention to the life before us, everything we do is an act of reverence: putting the shoes in the closet, making dinner, sweeping up the Cheerios on the floor.

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